It is a great company, trying to great things.  And has done some, from the standard model.  But when Geron announced that they were closing their embryonic stem cell efforts, it was like a lead weight falling on all the hopes of the embryonic promoters.  Geron had persevered where others had failed and got the FDA to approve an embryonic stem cell clinical trial.  As many know, they stopped that trial and closed down the whole division.  Startling to many (especially shareholders).  But the inevitable outcome for efforts that are born of a defiance to the facts of basic biology.  The facts are that the human body, given the right conditions, will rebuild itself.  

For the bulk of modern medical thinking, the adult body was "terminally differentiated," meaning it was a finished product and unrenewable, except for some few exceptions, the liver and bone marrow.  That's one reason bone marrow transplants have been done for 40+ years.  But what was a bone marrow transplant, but a kind of stem cell transplant, with blood stem cells.  And yet, our collective unconscious in medicine remained derived from what we can only think of as a long-standing view of the 'body' as a complete entity, a finished product that then slowly wore out.  As folks have found, bodies do regenerate, although inefficiently.  Think of how an injured brain 'rewires' itself, essentially 'regrowing' the kinds of connections that lead to function.  A transplanted female heart, in a male body, will become partly "male" with male heart cells (cardiomyoctes).  Where did they come from?  And a woman who gives birth to a boy, expecially if she has a sick heart, will find that some of her heart muscle is colonized with her son's stem cells.  The latter has greater relevance about what it is to be an "individual," not just about stem cells.

So, as the real stem cell business, using your own stem cells to cure disease, begins to gain momentum, we may find many of the unspoken presumptions of an old way of understanding bodies will fall away in the face of facts.  But do not look for it to go gladly.  We still hold ourselves above and outside of biology and the natural world.  But underneath it all, we are dynamic, renewable organisms, despite our unwillingness to do that.  Someday, maybe, we will stop fighting nature, supporting the myth of domination.  And then, maybe, we can learn the beauty of living within that nature, and within ourselves.